1.  Powelton Village and its freaked out freaks

It was back in the late spring of 1970, they said, the neighbors heard poor mj lorenzo talking to himself quite loudly at times in and out of his apartment in Powelton Village, loading his father’s car, talking in two distinct voices, arguing with himself like two brothers who had gotten weary of each other after sharing the same tiny space for 27 years.

In ‘nicer’ neighborhoods of the western world, as some later complained, ‘decent’ people would have informed authorities maybe and the poor boy would have gotten outside attention right then and never made his bizarre trip or written his revolutionary book either one. And the world would have been saved the ‘sad, sad joke’.

But the neighborhood mj had picked to move into recently was not ‘nice’.  The people who lived in it disliked attention from outside authorities because they distrusted them.

The problem was that by the spring of 1970 mj lorenzo could no longer be counted on to do the nice and decent thing as he always had done before, all of his life up until then; so the bizarre urban area he had chosen to live in did not look ordinary or good to any nice or decent people; not black; white; left; right; poor; or rich.

Mj had ’instinctively’, as certain informed observers insisted later, decided to begin his new life of working for doctor’s pay – finally, at age 26 – by renting a once-lovely, big, multi-bay-windowed apartment in a run-down late-Victorian gothic complex whose rental manager had not been about to inform mj, naturally, that the monstrous place had become famous in West Philly for its authentic died-in-the-tie Hippies tuning in, its nooks and crannies full of heroin addicts turning on, and its burnt-out radical 60’s leftists dropping out.

It was not until much later that mj finally noticed needles lying on the courtyard pavement, all of them quite far from trash cans (needless to say). And the distance of a blood-dried needle from a trash can, needles to say, was inversely proportional to its legitimacy (as any lily-white Methodist minister's son from the Jersey farm suburbs of Philly was supposed to know if he was going to insist on living in such a dump).

It was not a hospital neighborhood, after all, where a trashed needle could pop the plastic, leap through the bag and escape to the ground from human error. It was just fringe; nothing but one more old once-grand nineteenth-century urban residential neighborhood that had become run-down and had turned into one of the great USA’s first fully racially-integrated neighborhoods, black and white TOGETHER; that’s why it was ‘fringe’ in 1970. It was so ‘out there’, as its residents said, that the FBI was certain that draft dodgers and violent war protestors were hiding beneath its tattered wings all of the time. And the government’s watchdogs would come around nailing WANTED posters on telephone company poles and asking questions: all of the time.

No one called the authorities, therefore, not even nicely-and-decently-raised young doctor mj lorenzo when the black man and woman in the second-floor room across 35^th Street from his apartment confronted each other with knives loudly and shamelessly, their windows open and shades up. Nor did anyone call the authorities on that famous hot spring Saturday night many hours after midnight when intern Lorenzo was working in the emergency room up Powelton Ave. and the same neighbor from across 35th was hauled into mj’s ER on a stretcher face down with a butcher knife lodged in parts of one or two vertebral bodies – right in the middle of his back, in other words – its big silvery blade and wooden handle standing up in the air like a surreal curse on a Golden Dawn Tarot card.

Well: poor psychiatry intern mj lorenzo was dumbstruck. And since he just stood there speechless and paralyzed, the nurses had to call his superior, the on-duty surgery resident; who climbed up on the gurney like a hero and balanced himself way up toward the ceiling, straddling the unconscious man’s back – mj's own neighbor, mind you, who had given mj’s VW Bug a jump-start one day after the poor boy had come home exhausted from the hospital at dawn and forgotten to turn his headlights off. And that young surgery resident in his white surgery-training coat gripped the huge surreal knife with both linebacker fists and pulled upward to remove it while several nurses wrestled as hard as they could to hold mj’s senseless neighbor flat to the litter. And young intern Lorenzo just continued to stand there, useless to world medicine and humanity except to take it in for U.S. American moral history. And the surgery resident extracted not a millimeter of the cursed object (needless to say).

And, naturally, no one called the authorities to inform them that just a few blocks away from the old colonial carriage road to Lancaster, cobbled and trolleyed Lancaster Ave., right down Powelton Ave. from the hospital, the Powelton historic neighborhood’s colonial Friends Meeting House just a block from mj’s apartment was offering quiet harbor to pot-smoking anti-war Quaker pacifist friends of his who were doing their 1-Y alternative military service in the same Presbyterian Hospital where mj interned; or to report that political outlaw Rennie Davis had been living over on that far side of Powelton too in an elegant old Empire single-family mansion, back when he was helping to engineer the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late nineteen sixties.

And everyone but the authorities knew that Ira Einhorn lived in the neighborhood too. Poor Ira was accused later of having killed the woman who lived with him there. Though before that, in ’70, he was still respected – locally anyway – for he was the undisputed spokesman of the authentic died-in-the-tie hippie counterculture of the late 60's in Philly. But decades later websites said they had found his old lady’s body not long after the 60’s, cut up in a trunk somewhere, probably right in Ira’s apartment. He lived a short flight of wide Victorian stairs down from mj, on the next big wooden landing, in fact, where gross old Ira would always answer the door in a short T-shirt and not a stitch more, needles to say. And the websites said police finally had tracked him down in southern France living with a woman who defended his innocence, needles to say.

In Powelton Village in May of 1970, as the story went, you could kill your brother in the middle of 35^th at high noon and the neighborhood would just hose the blood to the gutter.

(In other words.)

And needless to say, almost, therefore, but important to spell out clearly as part of a full story of how world-famous saint mj lorenzo could ever have come to the point of writing his 1971 bombshell of an underground book, The Remaking; and in order to render mj’s infamous first and greatest history-changing book perfectly comprehensible to everyone from critics to admirers: mj lorenzo’s neighborhood was one where people consciously resisted any felt urge to call authorities if a young doctor talked to himself on the street, or more correctly, held conversations with himself aloud using two distinctly different voices. And those people resisted even more so if those two different voices addressed and answered each other in a way so spine-chillingly freakifying that the whole Powelton neighborhood, even as totally weird and weirded out as it was for its own freaked-out part already, was bound to remember forever, no matter by what strange and outrageous means they tried to forget.

For: ‘freaky’, after all, was part of their ticket to freedom from authority. To ‘freak out’ or ‘weird out’ was a thing they loved above all else, whether they did it to others or others did it to them, partly because of the very important result that – in either case – it pushed normal ‘decent and nice people’ away.

The group of mj lorenzo followers later called ‘early Remaking pundits’, by the way, were the ones who uncovered these little known psycho-sociological factors two years after the event when they went to Powelton Village themselves and tracked down and interviewed anyone discoverable who had lived around 35^th and Powelton in the spring of 1970 (including their very own freaked out selves in some odd cases).

But the most ‘mind-blowing’ and definitely the most research-inspiring finding of all, of course, to all Remaking pundits forever after, was the fact that for years and years no one in Powelton Village, once they had heard mj’s two voices talking to each other, could forget the poor boy as hard as they would try.

And yet while never forgetting mj’s grave condition they had never gotten him help.       

And that fascinating and deplorable fact had changed the whole ‘freaking’ world of everybody’s future for the better, as mj’s devoted Remaking pundit following loved to rave and needle forever after, needless to say.

And so psychiatry intern Lorenzo, who during his internship year had purposely moved a few blocks further from the medical school for a fresh look at the world, a financial break from urban up-scaling and a shorter walk to his new job at Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Hospital, continued on his way unimpeded and unheeded, for the most part, talking to himself loudly going in and going out of the peeling, spacious hallways of the old Victorian apartment house.

"You think too much!" he would say forcefully; and then, as if answering, quietly: "Well... I don't kno-ow," in the tone of, 'I wouldn't be so su-ure about that'. And again and again he would say the latter: 'Well.... I don't kno-ow.' Always with the same exact tone, so hauntingly musical, with that same twist of the shoulders, as if Greek-choric-ly semi-defending the value of Socratic higher thought; or as if pretending to be Socrates, if you prefer, and defending himself against his own critical student, and doing it over and over and over and over like a sound mixer gone kaflooey after somebody jammed chewing gum on the REPEAT button. "Well... I don't kno-ow…" And doing it so very innovatively too, for he was acting as his own protegé and professor, both; and at once.

(But he was not defending higher thought very effectively, if you thought about it; since he never seemed to know what in the world he thought, really, about thinking all this higher thought way too much.)

He was not caring for himself as well, either, as the ancient Greeks had cared for their protegés and professors. And so he was going downhill. And suddenly he left a note in the hospital internship mailbox at four o’clock in the morning and took off for good, no personal goodbye to anybody in this world. He made it look like he was angry politically, incensed at the heartless way poor penniless ‘Blacks’ were sometimes treated in the emergency room, surgery residents climbing up on top of gurneys tramping on clean white bed sheets in filthy shoes (when Black patients were lying on those sheets deathly sick) and trying, quite improperly, to pull out butcher knives lodged beside – or inside, more likely – spinal cords, without aid of X-ray or exploratory surgery; when those two procedures were universally accepted ‘standard of care’ for the purpose of minimizing damage to the life-vital spinal cord; and were morally required for diagnostic purposes therefore; even if a couple million neo-Calvinist Protestant U.S. American yacht owners might someday have to chip in one thousandth of a penny a month apiece to help the disgraced peon (whose life they judged as base; and whose life they could easily stand seeing finished) to have gotten the free care he needed.

Even further implied, therefore, by the angry tone of innuendo in psych intern Lorenzo’s goodbye note to his hospital internship was such a revolutionary and in-your-face question as: “Did Jesus Christ tell Mary Magdalene ‘Fuck off, puta’ ¹ when she needed a hand? Of course not. Then why did the rich white Presbyterians running rich white Presbyterian Hospital in a Black hell-hole of a Lancaster Avenue ghetto deem themselves Christ-followers and call themselves ‘Christ’-ians?”

But mj did not write this into the note, of course. He only implied it; maybe because he was still too good-hearted, poor ol mj. He preferred to appear too righteously indignant to ever want to debate the harsh political agenda in person or in writing, either one, a single word further. And he wanted to avoid confronting or affronting authority wherever possible, of course, just like the rest of his neighborhood did, so high-placed muckety-mucks could not prevent his doing what he was about to do.

But in truth (just between Dr. Lorenzo himself and us and Blinkin and Nod and the no-comment fencepost and its still quieter hole – and the clammed-up hospital internship too, because they too decided immediately to keep it all hush-hush –): young psych intern Dr. Mortimer Jack Lorenzo was just a tad bit off kilter.

And that is why, no doubt, he headed out at once in his father’s car, the same one he had demurely asked to borrow ‘just for the weekend’ ‘for a date’, since his Volkswagen Bug was ‘too small’. He spun out in that chrome-bedecked and steel-y-winged 1960 baby blue Buick Electra that Rev was so proud of, took off straight west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, no goal in mind, barely even clear-thinking enough to see consciously that his goal should have been relief, unquestionably, from whatever it was that was plaguing him. And the blue Buick was dragging bottom from a heavy and nonsensical, contradictory collection of weighty books and equipment, including all 18 volumes of the 1956 World Book Encyclopedia; several issues of National Geographic magazine containing maps and articles on the Canadian Northwest; a backpack and sleeping bag; apples; peaches; bread, cheese, lunchmeat; a heavy salesman's suitcase full of brand new unused pots and pans he had used as samples one college summer selling cookware door to door to young women building hope chests; his big heavy coiled brass French horn from college; a white doctor’s jacket; and a vast and weighty assortment of books from Jean Paul Sartre to Carl Jung to Kierkegaard, with all of which he was either very familiar or wishing to be, and in some of which, like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, he had found the going so abstruse and exasperating as to shove a sensible being over the edge straightaway.

2.  The incomparable idea triggered by seeing Pittsburgh’s three rivers

He was virtually directionless, this odd new kind of mj lorenzo, jam packed with senseless energy, not his usual sedate and scholarly, thinking and analyzing mj self, in other words. Yet when he got to the heart of Pittsburgh he had enough sense, fortunately, to get out and stretch, and was struck by the whole funny notion of three rivers touching in one spot, all three spanned by a single bridge. And then it was, then – and right there – that the next funny and un-logical non sequitur struck him: he had to get to the Continental Divide by the solstice so he could straddle the Divide and personally split East from West just as Einstein had split the atom. EXACTLY ON THE SOLSTICE so as to split not just physical reality, or space, but TIME as well, PERSONALLY, himself, mj lorenzo; to split both time and space simultaneously; for whatever earthly reason he did not know. But this thought was so compelling he could not resist it and had to head out again, even faster, because the solstice was coming fast. That was why, as well, around Rockford, northwest of Chicago, he mis-spent too much of the three hundred dollars his father had just given him and bought an insanely enormous carton box of Benzedrine stay-awake speed bennies from a trucker: so that he could drive all night and then again all day whenever he was sleepy, lest he miss his solstice appointment with fate. And he smoked pot to relax from the excitement and open up his mind for the impending grand event; and flew across the northern Great Plains like a bat out of West Philly, like a nuclear missile fired sideways from an upper Midwest silo, aimed straight at Glacier Park.

In no time then, a little outside and approaching the Park, he was dazzled and bemused for a moment by a very late-in-the-evening, nine-or-later, brilliant fluorescent pink sunset over the northerly peaks of the Rockies; and beyond all that, by a vast north-northwest sky opening up not to darkness and night, as anyone in their right mind would have expected, but to gleaming bright blue and sunlight, as if inviting him to come up there and check out that whole otherworldly universe in those strange parts, where all the rules were so wacky and backward that the sun shone bright at night. Because back here, in this world, the real world down on the ground in front of all that sky-high phantasmagoria, things were just like always. The sun was going down very slowly and a dark storm was moving in over the highest peaks, of course, since it was the time of year for afternoon and evening thunderstorms all up and down the American Rockies, and the time of day for all of the grave dangers portended by such high-country electric storms. But eastern boys with noses in books were too important to waste time on mundane tidbits like Rockies weather patterns, of course. So he kept on racing up the Going to the Sun Highway on wet pavement regardless, straight up through the awesome lightning, amidst all that thunder, a profound racket absolutely soul-shaking in the highest peaks, about as shocking and deafening as three atomic blasts in a row suffered ground zero without ear-plugs. He kept flooring that Buick Elektra right on and up up up through the rain and semi-darkness and fog and terrific heart-blasting thunder and lightning, straight up to the very, very top of the North American continent, Logan Pass.

3.  Logan Pass and its future-determining split second

There at the top he slowed and opened his door window to lessen the steam and fog and avail himself of the rare chance to hear unmuffled the loudest thunder in the universe. And he loved it. And he hoped that with the window open he might see better in the growing darkness just where the famous brown park sign with hand-carved yellow letters saying ‘Continental Divide’ might stand exactly, so he could confirm he was on the all-important space-splitting spot. But he could not see the sign. So he opened the whole big heavy blue Buick driver’s door; and he even set his left foot out on wet pavement, about to rotate and step out into the rain and look for the sign. And there – and then – it was; at the top, just when he saw the sign, with a co-instantaneous clap of deafening, spine-ripping thunder, that lightning struck him – him, mj lorenzo, personally – right there with one foot on either side of the Continental Divide exactly at the split second of the annual summer solstice when the rocking solar system into which mj lorenzo had been born reached its apogee, stopped swinging for a millionth of a second and began its swing back in the opposite direction. And mj’s right foot reflexed and drove the Buick straight off the edge, Rev’s gorgeous blue sexy dreamboat of a car, mj lorenzo himself half inside it and half out of it, diving and crashing it, rolling and landing it upside down and sadly totaled in a wonderful and soft pillow of bear grass (which many Latin American pundits, once they got in on Remaking punditry action in the nineties, loved to remind the world had saved mj lorenzo from death miraculously; despite the fact, as they admitted, that he had never hung a swinging saint from his rear-view mirror).

Now: after this point the story got tough to tell plainly and simply; for with the 'Crack-Up', as mj called the first part of his three-part Remaking book, he split into two distinct halves, ‘Mortimer’ and ‘Jack’. And for the rest of the trip and book and year, one side of him would disappear for all intents and purposes while the other side would take charge. And of course to make life exciting, for who wanted it dull, the two sides had to become extreme polar opposites, and each so extremely removed from his proper unified self, mj lorenzo, that they scarcely seemed to be mj at all, either one. Jack grabbed charge right at the moment of mj’s electric midsummer night's reaming and did things that poor ol Mortimer Lorenzo would not have done in nine dozen lifetimes. Jack hitch-hiked north as fast as he could, dragging Mortimer along in undiscoverable form, out of commission for now; so that nothing Jack Lorenzo did then or the whole summer to come was either very logical or very planned, especially at first. For, as much as Mortimer had always been calculating during all those years that he had been in charge of poor ol mj lorenzo, Jack was now spontaneous. And that probably explained why without even thinking about it – as wise interpreters stressed later – from Calgary northward Jack hopped trains through northern Alberta with a frenzy of speed right to the very end of the line, Hay River on Great Slave Lake; where he borrowed a book from the town library recounting a thousand magical Indian tales in French and sent a somewhat disjointed telegram to his parents saying not to send the Mounties for him. He was ‘fine’.

REV AND MRS JOHN HENRY LORENZO EMMANUEL METHODIST CHURCH FLORENCE NEW JERSEY USA JUNE 23 1970 STOP TRUTH CRACKED UP STOP TOTALLED BUICK STOP DOLLARS FINE STOP WORRYING STOP TRAIN NORTH STOP REST STOP UP HERE FREE AT LAST STOP DON’T SEND MOUNTIES STOP JACK HAY RIVER NORTHWEST TERRITORIES DOMINION OF CANADA STOP

But it took less than a shrink to diagnose that ‘Jack’ was less than himself, his normal usual mj lorenzo self; and that was why Jo Lorenzo went hysterical.

So Rev helped her call the Mounties to calm her down, thanking his bright son for the idea.

4.  Great Slave Lake and its awfully powerful Mackenzie River

Still heading senselessly north, wholly north and nothing but north and having succeeded at doing so, thus far, so very admirably; and having managed to get so far north so fast that even railways and autoways had all dead-ended, since hardly more than three or four people a year with any sense in their noggins wished to penetrate such a people-less, far-northerly and sub-polar region: Jack had no choice for the moment but to hoof it northward down some raggedy streets of Hay River and in this way came in minutes upon a vast blue lake that looked endless. He borrowed a good-sized canoe with every intention of returning it soon and he just kicked back, letting the lively blue lake current take him wherever it wanted to carry him. And it all felt absolutely wonderful. He felt free. And he loved it with every cell in his mindless body. He thought he was in glassy blue heaven forever. He did for a while; really. Mj’s brain was not working the way that it had before the drugs, electrocution and crack-up, of course, it must be understood.

And so Jack Lorenzo floated here and there on heavenly Great Slave Lake with all of its gorgeous sparkling pink-flecked grey rocks on its banks, thinking THIS WAS IT. AND IT WAS. For him. But before long the heavenly lake and its lovely, colorful green and pink banks were just as gone as he was, and now he was paddling a much livelier current naked, down an absolutely huge, northwest-ward-ly-flowing river, a great moving body of melted earth-surface run-off which bore him along on its back, a briskly moving humdinger of a thing that was ten whole city blocks wide at least, maybe, since from down at moving-water level it looked like at least a half mile or a mile to either bank. It was as wide as a son of a gun, as wide as Manhattan, that great old cruising flood, probably every bit as broad as the grand old Mississippi had been before it was tamed.

And it took him a while to get over the shock of being sucked straight up into one of the grandest moving forces on the hurtling planet, right down at humble, helpless surface level, protected by nothing but a canoe. But it was an up-sized canoe, and very stable too. And so, then, calming a little after several hours, and letting his large canoe float wherever the current took it on this Nordic river flanked by brown dirt banks and stately evergreen stands, and having nothing else to do but paddle a little, once in a while, Jack started writing a letter to his parents. And when he wearied of that he began to open his own mj lorenzo diaries from college, or 'Mortimer's diary', more correctly, 'Mortimer's notebooks', as he preferred to call them, a dull event because Mortimer had been so dull. He had been so bookish Jack had been only barely able to stand living with Mortimer, so fundamentally Christian, so terribly neo-Calvinist and controlled and controlling, so extremist-Protestant, so disgustingly devout and good and orderly. And ol Mortimer had taken over mj lorenzo so completely, for years and years, and more years, that it had driven Jack so crazy that now he never wanted Mortimer to come around again. So he took another couple of bennies. And he even changed strategies and kind of hugged the barely inhabited right-hand riverbank for security, bouncing off it like a hyperactive, over-revved speed freak, keeping this nonsense up for a thousand straight miles of Manhattan-wide, ferocious yang-force river, all the way to the Arctic, not knowing what else to do with himself but ENJOY the body and life he had been given for a few minutes, for once, and for FINALLY.

And only The Almighty could have said how many days mj lorenzo went on like that. The pundits argued the point for years because from Pittsburgh on, really, it seemed to them that mj in the form of ‘Jack’ had moved through space and time with such velocity it befit a lightning bolt not a living being.

But then when Jack got to the awesome spot where the horrendously big and broiling Mackenzie River was about to dump a near planet-full of muddy water into the big blue Beaufort Sea all at once, and along with it the tiny little frail and finite thing he called his own Jack SELF, he freaked out altogether and paddled desperately and crashed into the rocky and lovely right-hand Arctic beach, rendering some Canadian’s canoe useless as transport. He could not sleep there, of course, even as exhausted as he felt, for that was what amphetamine did to your restless solar system. He took more of those bennies for fear of what might happen if he did not take more of those bennies. The sun hung in the sky long into the night. It never set, in fact. It just hung there all night long and all day long too, of course, like it was star-struck and maybe moon-struck and dizzy too and hardly knew where to go next and so went in circles ever so slowly, just for being so all-out in love with itself and its own countless impressive consequences. And that was why he could not tell west from south, hardly. Except that he sensed, somehow or other, that he had gone downriver, northward, for heaven only knew how many days. And who in the world could know such things, after all, if and when they never slept or rested, and the sun never ever set?

5.  The delightfully naked Arctic

So Jack Lorenzo spent a long time in adrenaline shock once more, this time on an Arctic beach. But finally he left behind that Nordic ocean shore and all its sparkling rocks and pebbles, its screeching gulls and spraying surf. And he tried to walk past the rocky beach up onto dry and solid land. But he was at a loss for direction and kept crunching straight through muskeg into invisible wet bog, unable to find normal everyday land. He had mislaid his clothes somehow too and was actually wearing the sleeping bag at times, and going without it for an hour or so at times too since nobody was around, wearing just his backpack and the pots, with his French horn and the sleeping bag both strung to the pack and swinging and clanging in the breeze. He almost wished Mortimer had been there after all, to help him find direction using that sickeningly scientific and orderly Christian mind of his.

He must have walked this way for some days, said geography pundits later, probably in circles mirroring the sun, eating berries clanging and banging while the muskeg bog water soaked upward through his sleeping bag more and more until he had no choice finally but to take the stupid darn bag off altogether and walk around naked in the surprisingly warm Arctic summer sun, all day long, every day. And this felt perfect. He had not felt better in his life. He had always believed in going natural, and stuffy old Mortimer had never let him.

But there was still one problem, he had to admit. Mosquitoes were turning him into a single gigantic, and growing, red welt.

6.  The tiny frightened town of Tuktoyaktuk

Eventually Jack walked enough in a direction that was either lucky or instinctual, the latter more likely, and came right up upon, fully nigh up upon the outskirts of the tiny edge-of-earth town of Tuktoyaktuk. And he donned his damp sleeping bag again there on the outskirts, with French horn and pots and pans banging again enough to scare a whole Eskimo village out of its collective wits, even the huskies knowing enough to run for permanent nervous system protection. Except that just a few of the very bravest marble-playing little Inuk Eskimo boys stuck it out to see what the heck the commotion was. And Jack walked up to the least frightened, the merely bewildered dark-brown-skinned Inuk kid with circular face and big black eyes, there at the edge of that town, the edge of the planet and the edge of mj’s spiritual universe, and offered him an American dollar as motivation to go to the little Tuktoyaktuk town library, if one existed, or go to the school library or town history museum or anywhere, to the Methodist preacher’s parsonage best of all, if that worked, and borrow or rip off if need be a copy of Mackenzie's journals for him. Because Jack had read about Mackenzie in his World Book "M" volume and in a National Geographic article or two as well. And everybody had agreed that Mackenzie had paddled down to the Arctic and back in one short northern summer. So Mackenzie’s journals should reveal how Jack could do it too.

And this little Eskimo Inuk kid, sure as shootin’ rapids with a kayak, did come back from somewhere or other with a well-preserved, leather-bound copy of Mackenzie’s journals. And he gave Jack what turned out to be the incredible life-saving gift of a whole month’s worth of caribou pemmican his loving mom had made. And Jack therewith gave little Inuk two shiny stainless steel Aristocraft pots right off his very own walk-in bag for sleeping, where they had been hanging and banging very close to his heart, he said, the entire near-lifetime he had been walking in that bag, about five minutes actually; but he did not tell the little Inuk kid this revealing detail. And little Inuk gave Jack two of his prettiest marbles, right out of his right shorts pocket dirty with muskeg and tundra so that the detritus clung to the glassy spheres, lending them an incredible be-dazzling character, as Jack saw it. So he yanked out the very biggest U-shaped brass pipe valve from that useless French horn of his, and showed that to wide-eyed Inuk, emptying out the spit from it as an afterthought, of course. And then little Inuk reached out and accepted the shiny, gold-colored valve. And with that their trafficking came to an end because Inuk had nothing left on him but the shorts he was wearing and was willing to give them up, of course; but Jack was a better man than to take them. And Jack sat down and looked through Mackenzie’s journals while Inuk watched him wide-eyed, occasionally threading his golden bent hornpipe with a broken piece of fishing line he had found on the ground right there.

7.  Petitot’s strange tales and Mackenzie’s famous journals

Now it bears mentioning that Jack’s occasional reading of Petitot’s northern tribal tales while floating across-the-lake and down-the-river had provoked in him an eerie kind of alarm. Two years later the ‘early Remaking pundits’ would study this phenomenon in depth, thereby eventually identifying all sorts of fascinating, erudite and esoteric psychological reasons for such a paranoid-like reaction in their hero. Simply summed up: Northwestern Canadian Indian myths about twin brothers whose bizarre and amazing exploits together seemed virtually identical to mj lorenzo’s own Mortimer-and-Jack tale at many points – very oddly – had provoked paranoia in Jack’s super-susceptible-nervous-system state. They had triggered illogical thoughts all the way downriver to the Arctic to the point that even now as he sat on muskeg outside Tuktoyaktuk in his occasionally horn- and pot-clanging sleeping bag he still feared the power of the all-seeing eagle-eye of the Canadian Mounties to zoom in on poor little him and put an end to his fun and frolic and fabulous freedom to start his life over.

But now a different book, Mackenzie's journals, calmed him down, finally, bit by bit, just as soon as he had managed to psych out a few of its pages. For it described Mackenzie’s own canoe trip to the Arctic and back in great and adventurous detail. And unlike the Indian tales this second book assuaged his anxiety, maybe because instead of opening his mind to endless vague imaginings, it shut it down, essentially, by confirming the critical importance of rushing upriver quickly, before all the far northern rivers and lakes froze up solid again, which meant very soon, to a place southerly and civilized enough to offer safety and warmth for the long and deadly winter. Mackenzie's men had paddled their Scottish explorer-hero upstream by canoe in a jiffy for that very reason. And all of them had spent the winter together on an island in the middle of Lake Athabasca, in very fact.

So Jack vowed to repeat this crazy cockamamie feat in its entirety. Every detail. And he sent little round-faced, black-eyed Inuk for a supply of mosquito spray. And at the town docks Jack bought and ‘borrowed’ enough gasoline in containers to get him to the next outpost. And he set off this time in some Canadian’s motor-canoe he also sort of had to borrow without asking and hoped sincerely to return someday, somehow. And Jack and Inuk waved goodbye to each other until they couldn’t see each other any more.

……………………………..

And quite a few people, actually; every single one of whom seemed very nice and decent on most ordinary days; when they heard months or years later about mj lorenzo’s exciting ‘crack-up’, were quoted in various world periodicals in the usual we-would-just-like-to-say manner that they would not have been upset if mj’s canoe had turned totally over when it suddenly hit the powerful Mackenzie current which came down at him as he was going back south from the sea into and up the river again; and would not have cried if mj lorenzo had floated naked right there at the Arctic forever and ever, frozen solid right to his canoe seat, bottoms up, mj lorenzo and all of his future nut and pundit following and all of their insane noise.

But not to worry, they said, for soon the God who loved GOOD would accomplish as much and they, mj lorenzo’s critics and God’s favorites, would live with their sanity-loving Maker in peace and quiet again. Finally.²